Thing 3

Ok, so thing 3 is all about your online brand, I guess, if I'm honest, this is something I have never thought of before, I kind of just signed up to Facebook, Twitter etc without actually thinking about 'my brand' as such. My name on Facebook is Charmian Oldman, as I use it for half personal and half work related reasons whereas, my name on Twitter is Librarian _1, I can't really remember my original reason for picking this, it may have been due to the fact that Twitter is slightly less secure than Facebook, as anyone can follow you and I didn't want them to know my name. I have heard all sorts of horror stories about Facebook, people leaving their telephone numbers on there etc.

Photo: I don't have a photo of myself on Twitter or on Facebook, like a lot of people I hate having my photo taken but maybe this is something I need to remedy, on Facebook I usually have a photo from the most recent holiday I went on (although I have just realised that my current photo is from the NYC 10 collection and not the San Francisco 11). I possibly need to take a photo to put on there as I have recently had about 10 yards of hair chopped off and look slightly different now.

Personal V Professional: The main area where Personal and Professional clash I would say is Facebook, Twitter: I don't really use that much, just to keep up with professional stuff rather than tweeting, this newly created blog could be used for professional stuff, although I have read blogs where people have put more personal posts on. I think this is a good idea, as it makes the author seem more human and that they do have a life outside of the library world. Facebook is where the Professional and Personal meet in the middle. I have friends on there, but also libraries who have Facebook pages, as they came in useful when I was organising a Facebook page for where I currently work. Also, some of my friends are ex and current colleagues when I was working in libraries, so we tend to share Library stuff about (although this probably looks very geeky to my non-librarian friends). I also, just to confuse the issue, have a childhood friend, who I then lost touch with for about 25 years, only to find when we did reconnect, that she was also a librarian and had done her Library MA at the same place as I did. I do hear people talk a lot about the 'echo chamber' and how to get out of it, maybe one way would be to merge the personal and professional a bit more in online networks ? (This is very deep for a friday afternoon).

My Visual Brand: Twitter: I just have a stock, purple background, mainly because I feel that the way Twitter is set out, it can look a bit busy if you have too much detail in the background. My blog has a Green/Blue garden feel to it, I suppose subconciously (again, a big word for a friday afternoon), I picked it because it made me feel very chilled out and relaxed and that is how I would like to appear to people (I can hear laughter from my work colleagues as they read this). I think, even if you don't mean to, the backdrop for a blog can reveal a lot about a person's personality, even if they are picking a stock one from a selection of templates.

Ok, so now to Google myself, the whole of the first page is about me. The first five are a mixture of Twitter, Facebook and the book forum that we run at work. Then there are a couple of old electoral roll entries, some of the pages from the library website (which should have been changed ages ago), something which has me down as Medieval British Literature teacher in Winchester, which turned out to be an information literacy tool I joined ages ago and a reply to someone else's blog. I guess this is where having an unusual name comes in really handy, you get more exact results on a Google search. If I put in Librarian also, then again I get the first few hits, I guess this must mean that I am managing my online brand effectively. Although, I was very surprised to see that I am not the only Charmian doing CPD23. If I take my surname and the word librarian out, then I do not appear for at least the first five pages, so not sure whether this is a good or bad thing as people would have to know my full name and the fact that I was a librarian (although, if we are talking about professional networks, then they should know that anyway) and I realise that, if I had not been a librarian, then it would have been my name destiny to have either been a lecturer, designed jewellery, Jack London's second wife or played Liesel in The Sound of Music.

I will try and keep up with Thing 4 but am away next week, so we shall have to see.